Google+ Opens To Businesses With 'Pages'

karthikmns writes with news that Google is rolling out Google+ Pages, integrating businesses and brands into its social network. When Google+ launched, it asked businesses not to create user pages, which upset many companies who had grown accustomed to interacting with customers on Facebook. Today's update closes the gap between the two social networks in this regard, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how annoying you find social marketing. "If you’ve established a personal Google+ profile before, then the features offered through a Page will be familiar. You can place people into Circles, which lets you share content with specific sets of users. You can launch video hangouts, which lets you have face-to-face conversations with your followers. And the Pages work through the site’s mobile app. ... But Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a Page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles."

Comments

Features in the wrong order

[schlesinm]

Shouldn't Google+ worry more about getting people communicating with each other before they start throwing businesses on to the platform? Where is the API?

Re:Features in the wrong order

[tlhIngan]

There's a few hard core people on G+.

One I know is because he's so anti "walled garden" and pro-Open Source, so he posts lots of stuff that way.

Another I know is using a Facebook/G+ cross poster.

That's about it, really. Nothing really significant enough for me to check it daily - I only log in maybe once every few weeks just to clear the "1" away from my GMail.

No, I don't use Facebook much either, but things seem to be "happening" there. If I was Joe User, I wouldn't move to G+ when everything's happening just fine with Facebook. One of those "it's working and I get my stuff done - why should I bother with G+ and have to still check Facebook?" things.

Interacting?

[vlm]

I deleted my FB account a year or two ago, but

many companies who had grown accustomed to interacting with customers on Facebook

I never saw much "interaction" unless you mean spamming with marketing messages, or simply ignoring them. Is/was there any other form of FB interaction?

Re:Interacting?

[nepka]

Not all of them spam like that, especially small business owners. I have friends around the world and spend most of my year living elsewhere too, and especially in Asia some expats have small businesses on the side, like restaurants or baking things you can't get elsewhere. When they post "I'm baking (food we eat in my home country), they just went to oven!" it really doesn't seem like bad marketing. So I go visit, grab a beer and buy and eat a piece or two while talking with the guys at the same time. In addition to that, I don't really mind when the restaurants I visit post some party pictures (relaxed pictures, not "everyone is fucking drunk" ones), it doesn't bother me either. Of course, somehow in Asia stuff like that has a much more personal feel. And you can easily find new interesting people that way, and find the restaurants via your friends or people you meet. This is why Facebook is so good for it - you find stuff you don't even know to look for, via connections.

Of course, it's your own fault if you follow something like Walmart on Facebook.

I feel like...

[joocemann]

... Google needs to finish refining the product and then re-produce (since they did it before) the media campaign they carried out to drive excitement and interest in Google+. So many people came, got in, found few friends in the system, and left their G+ accounts stagnant --- or came, and didn't even get in --- that they really need a massive campaign to drive interest again. And since most people that use social networking already know about G+, they should approach it as such; they should be saying "come pop in again, and get your friends in for real this time" or something of the sort.

Like most of the people I know with G+ accounts, I appreciate it and its merits beyond facebook, but the long transition from the level of contact I have via FB to any level close to that in G+ looks like it is so far out that I hardly ever check G+ at all. Not only that, I see absolutely no trend of migration. I came to G+, got a few friends, invited some that came, and since then there has been NOTHING.

Come on Google! For your sake, and also for those of us who recognize your product quality, make yourself visible! (Its not like you don't have massive advertising, for free, within your reach, lol).

Re:I feel like...

[swillden]

Its not like you don't have massive advertising, for free, within your reach, lol

Actually, Google doesn't have free advertising within its reach. Not as much as you might think, anyway. Every Google+ ad they show that displaces a paid ad has a very definite and easily-measurable cost. And even ads that don't displace paid ads (Google often chooses not to show ads if nothing particularly relevant is available) have a non-zero cost to Google because they increase "ad blindness" in users.

More importantly

[fyngyrz]

It looks, at least, like Google has abandon the "Real Name" policy. Looking at the Google+ Privacy Policy and Google TOS pages today, I could not find any mention of a real name requirement. Unless I missed something (possible), it looks like Google did the Right Thing after considerable pressure from the community at large:

• Google TOS
• Google+ "Privacy Policy"

Anyone know any different? Is it actually permissible to have a pseudonym-based account on Google now?

Re:More importantly

[ganjadude]

wait... you mean that my sig has no power against you??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Re:More importantly

[nepka]

They have huge limits on your account if you use pseudonym instead. And they only backed out of real name policy as it become impossible to verify with different nationals and they started losing users. Of course, they are still losing users.

Google just doesn't seem to get the full picture. They imitate Facebook but do it poorly. Lets take for example this pages change. They didn't implement pages properly, they only modified the profile system a bit and actually restricted pages. Google+ pages don't allow HTML or anything else like Facebook does. The absolutely worst thing is the url though; With Facebook you get facebook.com/nintendo. Companies can easily put that in to ads and other material. With Google+ the url is http://plus.google.com/58493672095786225. Awesome! Google just doesn't see the whole picture.

Re:More importantly

[fyngyrz]

They have huge limits on your account if you use pseudonym instead.

What are those limits? More to the point, where are they? They aren't on the TOS page, at least I didn't see anything like that.

Re:More importantly

[Synerg1y]

umm.. not sure if your trolling but, don't talk about the web if you don't know how to use google or what a url is...

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/

If you don't understand why HAVING TO USE google's search engine to utilize the + feature does not conform to a url (the thing you use to access websites) then Idk what to say to you, alone indeed. Try the astronomy section of slashdot.

Re:More importantly

[Synerg1y]

So if I wanted to access plus.google.com and I happen to be using lynx and I wanted to access pepsi directly, please advise what would I do?

+ operator

[Barryke]

I see Google now wants me to google ' +Brand Or Business That I Want To Videochat With '
So that is why they disabled the + search operator, now requiring two double quotes surrounding the word you insist on actually appearing in every search result.